9. May 1942: The exhibition „Das
Sowjetparadies“ in the Lustgarten. Wierd. And the Eisernen Front in the
Berliner Lustgarten 6. March 1932

After the war, 1955.

The Lustgarten (English: "Pleasure Garden") is a park on Museum Island in
central Berlin, near the site of the former Berliner Stadtschloss
(Berlin City Palace), to which it originally belonged. The Lustgarten,
originally a private garden, has at various times been used as a parade
ground, a place for mass rallies and a public park.

The area of the Lustgarten was originally developed in the 16th
century as a kitchen garden attached to the Palace, then the residence
of the Elector of Brandenburg, the core of the later Kingdom of Prussia.
After the devastation of Germany during the Thirty Years War, Berlin was
redeveloped by Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elector) and his Dutch wife,
Luise Henriette of Nassau. It was Luise, with the assistance of a
military engineer Johann Mauritz and a landscape gardener Michael Hanff,
who, in 1646, converted the former kitchen garden into a formal garden,
with fountains and geometric paths, and gave it its current name.

In 1713, Friedrich Wilhelm I became King of Prussia and set about
converting Prussia into a militarised state. He ripped out his
grandmother's garden and converted the Lustgarten into a sand-covered
parade ground: Pariser Platz near the Brandenburg Gate and Leipziger
Platz were also laid out as parade grounds at this time. In 1790,
Friedrich Wilhelm II allowed the Lustgarten to be turned back into a
park, but during French occupation of Berlin in 1806 Napoleon again
drilled troops there.

In the early 19th century, the enlarged and increasingly wealthy
Kingdom of Prussia undertook major redevelopments of central Berlin. A
large, new classical building, the Old Museum, was built at the
north-western end of the Lustgarten by the leading architect, Karl
Friedrich Schinkel, and between 1826 and 1829 the Lustgarten was
redesigned by Peter Joseph Lenné, with formal paths dividing the park
into six sectors. A 13-metre high fountain in the centre, operated by a
steam engine, was one of the marvels of the age. Between 1894 and 1905,
the old Protestant cathedral on the northern side of the park was
replaced by a much larger building, the Berliner Dom, designed by Julius
Carl Raschdorff. In 1871, the fountain was replaced by a large
equestrian statue of Friedrich Wilhelm III.

During the years of the Weimar Republic, the Lustgarten was
frequently used for political demonstrations. The Socialists and
Communists held frequent rallies there. In August, 1921, 500,000 people
demonstrated against right-wing extremist violence. After the murder of
Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in June, 1922, 250,000 protested in
the Lustgarten. In February, 1933, 200,000 people demonstrated against
the new Nazi Party regime of Adolf Hitler: shortly afterwards public
opposition to the regime was banned. Under the Nazis, the Lustgarten was
converted into a site for mass rallies. In 1934, it was paved over and
the equestrian statue removed. Hitler addressed mass rallies of up to a
million people there.

In 1945, the Lustgarten was a bomb-pitted wasteland. The German
Democratic Republic left Hitler's paving in place, but planted lime
trees around the parade ground to reduce its militaristic appearance.
The whole area was renamed Marx-Engels-Platz. They also demolished the
City Palace, later building the modernist Palace of the Republic on part
of the site. It was not until after the reunification of Germany, in
1991, that a movement to turn the Lustgarten back into a park was begun.
In 1997, the Berlin Senate commissioned the landscape architect Hans
Loidl to redesign the area in the spirit of Lenné's design, and
construction work began at the beginning of 1998. The Lustgarten is now
once again a park with fountains in the heart of a reunited Berlin.